Don't be afraid if you think your question is too simple. AskPhilosophy defines itself less by the sort of questions that are accepted than by the sort of answers they can expect to receive. Feel free to ask about topics you're studying in school, but please read about how to avoid plagiarism first.

Want to be a panelist? Have questions about what that means? Start here.

If you plan to comment regularly, you must request flair. Comments (not questions) posted by users without flair will be looked on with suspicion.

I read posts on academic subreddits and the top comments are a lot of the time incredibly insightful and intelligent, and on so many broad subjects. If these people spending time on Reddit know so much, that means the academic community at large, which has been in operation for hundreds of years purpoting to be seeking the truth, should be well on their way to Knowing It All.

With the exponential increase in the things that have exponentially grown in the past century alone, it feels like we should be nearing closer to a fundamental Answer For Everything, yet it seems the more we climb the mountain the further away the Truth seems to flee. Almost like planned obsolescence of the Truth.

My statement is that the progress toward public enlightenment has been infinitesimal. I'm feeling very Cynic.

The optimistic short answer to scepticism about philosophical progress is that the questions philosophy grapples with are extremely difficult and fundamental. We've made great progress with respect some issues, but there's still a ways to go given how difficult the questions are.

A less optimistic view might say that either there are no answers, or alternatively that the questions are so fundamental that it doesn't make sense to have answers for them at all, even in principle. The former view is generally dubbed a form of metaphilosophical nihilism and the latter can be found prominently in Wittgenstein's On Certainty.

There is also the view that the philosophical problem has been solved. All that remains to be done is for you to do the work to see it.

As far as why academia fails the public, academic communities create a narrative about progress that prevents or controls institutional change and the agents thereof. That's working as designed. Not much money to be made in solving problems, this is a service economy after all.

How do you guys on r/philosophy feel about Lacan? I can't help but see OP's thoughts about truth reflected in Lacan's objet petit a, and can see in OP's dilemma the texture of the Lacanian Real. I've tended to note some resistance to these readings elsewhere, so what about here?

My personal view on this is that philosophical systems ultimately come down to ways of conceptualizing the world. There isn't necessarily any right or wrong way to conceptualize the world-- in fact, any standard for accuracy of such conceptualization we might point to would itself be a component of a conceptual system. In the absence of a clear, universal, external grounding for what constitutes the "right" conceptual system, the notion of accuracy or truth, and thus progress, is ill-defined in a way it is not for e.g. the sciences.

We can certainly appeal to properties we'd like our conceptual systems to have-- clarity and universality of application, widespread intersubjective agreement, utility in managing our interactions with the world, eachother, and ourselves, etc. But there is something of a meta-problem of deciding which are the relevant properties to be satisfied, and to what extent a given system actually does satisfy these properties. And there is also a problem analogous to the problem of underdetermination of scientific theories-- just because the conceptual system you have struck upon seems to be sensical and useful, etc doesn't imply that there aren't alternative systems that could do just about as well or better.

In a metaphor, if science is about accurately describing the contents of a room on the basis of a photograph, philosophy is about the location and angle of the camera used to take the photo. Within limits, there is an objective standard for accuracy in describing the contents of the photo, but this whole endeavor is situated within and dependent upon the wider context of the positioning of the camera. And the positioning of the camera itself is kind of an arbitrary decision-- different locations and angles will reveal different things about the room, and satisfy different goals in characterizing the room, but ultimately there is no such thing as a right or wrong way of placing the camera.

Wittgenstein proposed that there are no philosophical problems. Philosophy arises when language becomes too muddled to satisfactorily answer questions about the world. One could say that we don't Know It All because our linguistic propositions don't satisfy the world community as a whole, and we therefore continue to seek new ways to explain solutions over and over again. Philosophy is a problem of communication, not of cognition.

Quine certainly didn't help clear-up philosophical issues with his usage of prose. And then there was the Sokal Affair...

I think that Godel's incompleteness theorems are very suggestive in light of your question. It is literally impossible to know everything. There is always another "why?" lurking behind the resolution to the last one.

More specifically, for any sufficiently complete axiomatic system, there are certain propositions which render it inconsistent. The inverse is also the case.

Truth is an interesting notion. It is very slippery. It's hard to even define it. To state all that is, ever was or ever will be, is quite the task. Quite beyond the scope of such limited beings as ourselves, in my humble estimation.

Dummett's isn't a paradox; it's his semantic anti-realism. I reference his name alone because a good portion of his life's work was to developing said project.

Fitch's Paradox is roughly the view that if all truths knowable, they're all in fact known (which would be a bad result for a theory like Dummett's).

Your formulation of the incompleteness theorem is incorrect for the reasons outlined above but also because there are plenty of axiomatic systems which are consistent and complete - foremost amongst them classical first-order logic.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I agree with the majority of it.

I do not want to project myself as the child who unceasingly asks, "why?" ad infinitum.

But, to use an example from another discipline, in the sense that we don't know with 100% certitude many very important and crucial to your worldview quantum / astronomical things are happening, but we are pretty sure they are happening and here's the math - there are unknowns but they are in the 1/10,000,000,000 decimal place.

Why does this not apply to socail / political / philosophical happenings? Where people are seemingly just banging their heads against the wall? (the wall of Plato's cave)

Because for the stuff that we do know, we stop talking about it. Philosophers used to wonder whether slavery was a great idea or whether women should be in positions of power. Now philosophers don't really see those as open questions.

I sincerely doubt that, but even if we grant this point, so what? We've figured out the stuff that we can figure out, mostly, and now there's just a bit of stuff left, plus problems that we can't solve.

You're quite welcome. I personally would say that the child who asks "why?" ad infinitum is doing us all a favour. In fact I was that child, and now I am that adult.

To make a weak attempt to answer your question, I would say that uncertainty is a necessary and pervasive aspect of our universe and this runs across all domains, whether physical, mental, social, etc. And while we may have certainty-for-the-most-part, the factors that give rise to macroscopic physical phenomena, to say nothing of social/political movements, are so complex and causally interconnected that even the tiniest smidgen of undecidability is enough to render our predictive capabilities totally inadequate when amplified over innumerable orders of magnitude. This is why we can neither predict the weather, or the ebb and flow of economies, or the fate of empires. Certainty to the 50th-place after the decimal is something quite different from certainty to the nth-place after the decimal, plus-or-minus nothing. Just the fact that an almost negligible change in the molecular structure of a compound can change it from being physiologically inert to completely psychoactive tells me that the small stuff really matters, as it regards psychology, and that is a rather small aspect when you consider the complexity of life as a whole over thousands or millions of years.

Sometimes I read and I think nobody has come up with anything important/fresh/pertinent to say since Descartes.

Sometimes I read and think nobody has come up with anything important/fresh/pertinent since Socrates.

Sometimes I think I need to re-read and really try to understand A Thousand Plateaus, because I don't think I understand.

Also, It seems, that Reddit should really have fast-tracked the philosophical process, with 100's of Kants discussing 1,000 of subjects with 300 Einsteins fact-checking and a few Buddhas overseeing. It's a monkey-typewriter situation, and I'm upset we haven't hit Dickens like we have in the other disciplines.

Sometimes I think I need to re-read and really try to understand [1] A Thousand Plateaus, because I don't think I understand.

Anti-Oedipus is much better (to say nothing of its difficulty).

It's a monkey-typewriter situation, and I'm upset we haven't hit Dickens like we have in the other disciplines.

The problem is that the monkeys can't type what they don't know in our situation. I come from continental philosophy, where the gestures are both small and big, but where universality has been abandoned mostly. Bataille, in his unfinished book on non-knowledge writes:

I have nothing to say against gambling. But to take it seriously? Speaking seriously about freedom or about God? We don't know anything about it, and if we talk about it, it's a gamble. Everything that goes beyond common truth is a gamble. but we know that it's a gamble and, finding ourselves engaged in this gamble as in a serious act, we can do nothing but follow it through a little more seriously than the others, so as to disengage it from seriousness.

and

We had limited truths, the meaning, the structure of which was valuable in a given sphere. But from there, we always wanted to go further, being unable to bear the idea of the night into which I am.

My statement is that the progress toward public enlightenment has been infinitesimal.

The pursuit of truth, above all else, by danger-seeking and cutting edge philosopher and scientists is a 'nice' idea. I'd be more interested to see broader education initiatives aimed at freedom and creativity rather than standardized curriculum as a means of (and not the sole one) for trying to work our way out of self-incurred minority as Kant says. The Enlightenment, as Kant writes about it, is about public education towards individual strivings for universal truth; not necessarily anyone actually getting there. So, when we bemoan the great men or the community for not achieving truth, I think it best we step back and ask the Marxist-materialist question... what is it about today's world that would allow us to understand why education is often so oppressive and boring and working towards producing workers rather than people.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions might be relevant here, at least with respect to scientific disciplines. Science appears to be a steady accumulation of facts slowly closing in on some answer that is "out there". Kuhn says this is merely an appearance, however. The practice of normal science under an accepted paradigm has, built within it, the function of rooting out anomalies that will eventually lead to rejection of the old paradigm and acceptance of a new one. This could be a reason why it seems, "the more we climb the mountain the further away the Truth seems to flee". It might be more accurate to think of scientific progress in evolutionary terms, as something that responds to a particular environment (defined by our values, accepted practices, metaphysical beliefs, etc.), rather than something that is progressing towards an ideal form of truth.